You might be surprised at how few people actually get credits when playing a game, but just look at your achievements and you'll see for yourself. 28.9% of Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 players made it through Bohemia. Just 23 people put Dreamscourge to rest in the Avowed. Only 50% of Baldur's Gate 3 players solved the druid-goblin conflict in the first act.
Developers are well aware of this discrepancy. Former Capcom, THQ, and Sega executive John Lee noted in 2011 that “only 20% of players ever finish a game.” At the time, he was referring to the situation '10 years ago', but another 10 years have passed and little has changed.
Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser, who helped write the scripts for every Grand Theft Auto game until his resignation in 2020, spoke about this exact issue at a Tribeca Festival panel in New York this weekend. He said that after the success of GTA 3, getting more people to enjoy the game to its fullest was one of the studio's main goals, and surprisingly, it succeeded.
“The whole point of open world games is to provide guidance,” Houser said (thanks, IGN). “We want you to experience the story. Since GTA 3, our goal has always been to try to get more people to complete the story, and that number has only grown. It used to be pretty good.”
Almost half of Red Dead Redemption 2 players have completed the story.
38% of players built a homestead with John Marston in the Red Dead Redemption 2 epilogue (42% (nearly half of players) saw Arthur's story all the way to Chapter 6), and 29.42% completed the Big Score in GTA 5. This may not sound like much, but it is above average. This is exactly what Rockstar was going for.
This inconsistency isn't too bad in a linear game, often resulting in completion rates around 40-50%, with a whopping 72.1% of players fighting to get through Raccoon City in Resident Evil Requiem. But open world games are sandboxes with plenty of distractions to tempt you off the beaten path. It's understandable that the writers would want players to experience everything the story has to offer, but Houser acknowledges that there's much more to an open world than narrative.
“Ultimately it's up to the players. They enjoy being in the world, messing around, doing whatever they want and messing with the system,” he said. “The most fun thing about the game is not the crap we make, but the systems we make. [What’s] The most fun thing in the world is watching what happens when you jump off this building, hit someone, drive a car, interact with this or that. It's always going to have some sort of magical quality to it and we're at a certain level story-wise.
- released
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October 23, 2001
- ESRB
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M (Mature): Blood, language, violence
- engine
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renderware
